Old School Monday: The Lust List '96

While everyone is prepping for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we decided to take a look back at the tech goodies of yesteryear. What was the must-have gadget from fourteen years ago? What was the one item that we needed to have, to hold in our hands? What were we lusting after?

In order to answer those questions, and many, many more, may we present the Lust List from boot December 1996. We got Editorial Director Jon Phillips and Reviews Editor Michael Brown to chime in about their picks from '96.

"Yikes. I don’t know which is more cringe-worthy: Me lusting over the Global Village NewsCatcher (10 bucks a month for online news? Really?), or the photo of me wearing granny glasses. The Cambridge SoundWorks MicroWorks, on the other hand, remains a solid speaker system to this day.

Looking at some of my former colleagues’ lists, I can’t imagine what the world would be like today if a 9GB hard drive cost three grand, a 100Mb/sec Ethernet hub cost $2,400, and we accessed the Internet using 56Kb/sec modems." -Reviews Editor, Michael Brown

“I must have written my Lust List just a few months before I transitioned from full-time work on The Net magazine to boot. Yet even before I became a diehard hardware enthusiast – which is what boot would do to you, back in the day -- it seems I was lusting after lasers. In 1996, it was a table-top laser that cost more than $100,000. Some 15 years later, it’s a $300 laser you can hold in your hand. But I bet today’s $300 model is even more powerful than the $100,000 model from 1996. Is there a Moore’s Law for lasers?” - Editorial Director, Jon Phillips